I've just turned the PHOENIX revisions in. Matrice said she'd trade me COYOTE notes for the PHOENIX revisions at the end of this week.

There is a scene in FARMER'S BOY, the Laura Ingalls Wilder novel about Almanzo, her husband's, childhood, which I keep thinking of.

It's sheep-shearing season in this scene, and Almanzo is too little to help shear. His job is to run the bundled wool up the ladder into the barn's loft while his father and--uncle, or brother; I forget which--do the shearing. He's working as hard as he can, running up and down as fast as he can, but they're faster at shearing than he is at bundling and carrying the wool, and they keep teasing him about it. Eventually it's lunchtime, and they go to lunch while Almanzo has to finish carrying the wool they've done upstairs.

While he's at it, he hauls a sheep up there, too.

Then he, too, goes to lunch, and the afternoon is spent doing exactly the same thing: Almanzo running his legs off while he's teased mercilessly about falling behind. At the end of the day, they've sheared all the sheep, and are crowing over having outpaced Almanzo, who turns to *them* in triumph and says, "No! I've got a fleece upstairs you haven't shorn yet!"

Turning PHOENIX in before I've gotten the COYOTE revisions feels distinctly as if I've got an unshorn fleece upstairs, and have every right to dance triumphantly. :)

I'm going to go slather myself in sunblock and see if I can find the riding school now. In theory it's about a 3 mile walk and fairly straightforward to find, but the Irish don't believe in road signs, which may make it an adventure. OTOH, it's an island. I can't get *that* lost. :)

And while I hadn't thought of it as food porn, it *really* *is*. It must've been *many* of our first experiences with food porn. :)

It *was*. :) I re-read the books in the last 2 years, and as an adult, I can look at it and think maybe it also contributed to my bad eating habits. He ate an ungodly amount of food per meal! (And at 7 years of age, you don't think about the amount of calories he's burning working on the farm :).

Ooh. What's bird's nest pudding like?

OMG, it's to die for. I'll post the recipe later?

It's a very thin flour batter mixed with stiffly whipped egg whites flavored with maple flavoring, poured into a baking dish around cored, peeled apples stuffed with all kinds of good stuff (like cinnamon, nutmeg and brown sugar) that is then baked. The batter puffs up and browns into a fluffy, cloud-like almost-meringue around the apples, which get all soft and squishy in the oven. It's then served with sweetened nutmeg-spiked heavy cream.

Wilder's description of pouring the speckled cream over the apple-and-batter "bird's nest" and the cream curling together with the brown syrup of the baked apples and brown sugar at the bottom of the plate is an image that's stuck with me for nearly 30 years now. Mmmmmm.

With the fleece story being in my head recently I was thinking I needed to re-read those. I don't think I've read them since high school. But I remember HOW MUCH FOOD they ate! And yeah, as a kid you don't think about 12 hours of hard physical labor and the calories you burn, you just think YUM!

OMG. That sounds *insanely* good. (My brother in law's allergic to chocolate but loves apples, so I'm going to have to make it for us him. ) *Please* post the recipe! Wow. *Wow* that sounds good. *swoon*!